Gamophobia and Philophobia

According to dictionary.com, gamophobia is the fear of marriage.  According to fearof.net, it has also come to mean the fear of commitment. Another pertinent word for my blog post today would be philophobia, which according to dictionary.com means a fear of love or fear of falling in love.

Labels

People love to toss labels around. Whether they are deserved or not is a whole different issue. It is easy today to find yourself labeled homophobic, racist, Islamophobic, or any one of thousands of other labels. People just love to label and pigeonhole groups and individuals. Name them. File them away. Write them off.

That being said, I think I can rightly label a huge percentage of people, especially divorcees, those I like to call serial daters, Generation Xers, and Millennials as gamophobic and philophobic.

The Trend

There has been a trend in recent years away from marriage and toward relationships of a more, shall we say, limited duration. For example, I was listening to a podcast recently. In it, the host mentioned his current girlfriend – his current girlfriend. I’m sure if she heard that podcast episode she must have felt all warm and fuzzy and totally secure in their relationship.

Even that is not as bad as the author who on the author bio in his book referred to his girlfriend as the woman he is “currently f***ing”. Here again, I’m sure that made his “significant other” feel really significant.

But, Why?

A growing segment of the population is content to settle for what they can get and has given up on creating a happy, stable marriage. How did we become a nation of commitment-phobes? Why do modern relationships have such a short lifespan and transient nature? Must every relationship have an exciting beginning, a declining, middle, and an inevitable end?

In part, this fear is understandable. A large number of forty-somethings and fifty-somethings have been through failed marriages. They are scared to death of ever going through another divorce or even getting that close to anyone again. That was me and is many divorcees my age. Meanwhile, the kids who witnessed those divorces are now marrying age. They have seen the horrors their parents went through and they want none of it. Now they have a fear of commitment too.

When you couple those fears with modern society’s shifting morality and drift from the Christian worldview, this is what you get. You get a decrease in marriage, an increase in gamophobia and philophobia, an increase in living together, and an increase in sexualized, short-lived dating relationships.

Call Me Old-Fashioned

It is understandable, but is it desirable? Is this really what is best for us, our children, and our society? You can call me old-fashioned, – go ahead, I’ll wait –  but I believe that marriage is good for us, good for our children, and good for our civilization.

Furthermore, I believe that it is in the security of a loving, stable, intimate, committed marriage that people thrive – and have the best sex. How can a one-night-stand or a series of transient sexual relationships ever measure up to what two people build up over decades of committing to learning to pleasure each other?

So, do you still think I’m old-fashioned? That’s okay. Maybe old-fashioned isn’t so bad. Maybe old-fashioned does not necessarily equate to dull, boring, or prudish after all.

A Real Commitment

Let me be perfectly clear. I probably should never start a paragraph that way. Every time a politician says that it is followed by an unbelievable barrage of obfuscation, equivocation, and misdirection. Oh well, anyway …

I do want to be clear about this. When I say commitment, I mean a lifelong,